2R03 Lecture 7.docx

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Fox 1 Lecture 7
SOCIOL 2R03
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Chapter 7- Status & Prestige
 Agenda
 Pierre Bourdieu (1979), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
 Habitus: speech patterns, lifestyle, appreciation that determines where an individual
feels comfortable and knowledgeable or “at home”
 Capital (Social, cultural…)
 Taste
 The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke by
Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren-Tyagi (2003)
 Thorstein Veblen (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class
 Conspicuous consumption
 Page 161: occupation and prestige
 Money influences how people make distinctions about prestige in the occupational
category: (Teacher, Senior Janitor and Plumber example)
 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu,1979)
 Tastes preferences of individuals in different social classes
 “..how cultivated disposition and cultural competence” are revealed through the
consumption of good (1979: 13)
 Socialization marks distinction
 Choices we make create class based distinctions that divide people from each other
(learn to be culturally like our class: social positions and how we value the things in
them and learn to have a distaste for likings of people below us
 “Like every sort of taste, it unites and separates.
 Being the product of the conditioning associated
 With a particular class of conditions of existence,
 It unites all those who are the product of similar
 Conditions while distinguishing them from all others.
 And it distinguishes in an essential way, since
 Taste is the basis of all that one has—people and
 Things—and all that one is for others, whereby
 One classifies oneself and is classified by others…”
 (Bourdieu, 1979: 56). Fox 2 Lecture 7
 Capital: symbolic, cultural, social
 Habitus: “mental structures through which individuals apprehend the social world”
(1990: 130)